Competition Authority Urges Hotels to Step Up Pricing Strategy

This week, the Competition and Markets Authority encourages hotels to step up their pricing strategy on OTAs. After finding that 47% of hotels surveyed were not aware that Booking.com and Expedia had agreed to drop price parity clauses, they published guidance for hotels on varying their prices across different OTAs.

Additionally, data insights have been published to reveal what companies across the travel space should focus on to improve their search visibility. These include a ‘highly browsable experience,’ meaning one designed for easy navigation and focused on relevant content. You can also take a look at articles from the week on becoming mobile-friendly, building hotel loyalty programs, and marketing mistakes.

The Competition and Markets Authority is encouraging hoteliers to increase competition by varying deals on different online travel agency partners.

The UK regulator took part in EU-wide research with nine other national competition agencies involving hotels, OTAs and metasearch sites.

It found 79% of hotels had not varied the price for their rooms across OTA platforms since 2015 when Expedia and Booking.com agreed to stop insisting on price parity clauses. The research also found 47% of hotels surveyed were not aware that Booking.com and Expedia had even made these changes.

The CMA today published guidance for hotels for the setting of prices for online travel agents.

New research from Searchmetrics identifies the important travel industry-specific search ranking factors that travel agents, airlines, hotel chains and other travel-related brands should consider in order to help improve their visibility in Google searches.

A summary of the findings is: Travel brands rank higher by giving searchers a highly browsable experience, helping them easily gather and compare related information. They should also cover topics comprehensively, using more words and more large images, even if this means pages load a little slower.

Running a hotel isn’t easy. In the day-to-day grind we can sometimes let some things fall through the cracks. Today, let’s take a step back to reflect and talk about 5 mistakes we see hoteliers regularly make with their marketing, and we’ll share our tips on how to fix them and get on the path to your best hotel marketing yet!

Loyalty programs have become a more valuable tool for every type of hotel as the Book Direct movement has increased momentum. They are seen, especially by major chains, as the natural progression to gain a longer term value from the guests. After working so hard to persuade guests to book directly for the first booking, hotels wants to encourage the guest as much as possible to come back directly again and again.

Focused exclusively on the hotel sector, Net Affinity has collated the brightest, most commercially focused, experienced and passionate team of online marketers, account managers, designers and developers whose combined skill set ensures our clients online success and continued growth.
We created this blog because we wanted to share our expertise with you, and offer you the knowledge that over 15 years experience in the hotel industry has given us.